My Financial Journey

As I vaguely mentioned in my $100,000 by Age 30 year end recap post my wife and I are starting to save for a house we want to build down the road (probably 2-3 years from now). While I’ve been planning this already for a few years, now that I have a savings account setup and a general timeframe in my head I’ve really started to up my planning and research.
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Seeing as how I just opened a new Chase Cash Plus Rewards Card, I figured if I’m going to do the balance transfer thing I might as well apply for that card right now too so that the ding on my credit score all happens at one time. I believe they group credit requests in a short period of time as one single inquiry, dunno we’ll see.

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Well I maxed the $300 annual reward limit on my Chase Cash plus rewards card and I was dissappointed to find out that you can no longer get the card online anymore. Well through a friend I found out that you can still get this card by going into the actual Chase branches. I did so this afternoon and have my 2nd Cash Plus Rewards card on the way.

The great thing about this card is that it pays 5% back on gas and groceries and 1% on everything else. What’s even better about this card is that it treats every single purchase at my local Super Walmart as Groceries and thus I get 5% back on all my Walmart purchases. Seeing as how I am already a Walmart junky this comes in very handy. (more…)

When we bought our house last summer, I ended up taking out a $16,500 Home Equity Line of Credit to satisfy the 20% down rule and eliminate any PMI charges and secure a lower rate on the 30 year fixed mortgage I was taking out. Well I’ve widdled this down to a little under $6,000 in the first year, but I’ve kind of hit a wall now. Basically last two months I haven’t been able to make anything but the minimum payment on my HELOC and well the damn interest rate keeps going up, so I am thinking about playing the balance transfer game to pay off the HELOC for at least the next 12 months go give us some breathing room and save us about $42 a month in interest charges stemming from the HELOC. On top of that technically my HELOC will owe my Roth IRA accounts about $8,000 come Jan 1, so my HELOC still has some bite in it at this point and I’d be earning interest off of some credit card companies money rather than paying the mortgage company hard earned cash each month.

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A couple of months ago it appeared that Chase was ditching the Cash Plus Rewards card that so many people in the PF community loved. This card offered 5% back on grocery & gas purchases and 1% back on everything else. Well I was really dissappointed when it appeared that Chase pulled the plug on this card (I think less than a year after they implemented it) because I bank at Chase and well I like to be able to access all of my accounts from one on web page and have on point of contact for my banking/credit cards.

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Well I went ahead and splurged and paid the $5.95 to get my credit score with my free credit reports and my score currently is an 861. I believe that’s pretty good, although its not as high as it could be (scores range from 400-925). I have nothing negative on any of my credit reports and well there shouldn’t be. I’m guessing my credit score is hurt by lack of history seeing as how I am only 26 and my credit history is only a couple years old…. and possibly that my mortgage is still at about 78-80% utilization. Anyway I guess the score is high enough that should I ever need credit I can probably secure it, but I’m kind of ticked that I’m not in the 900s…oh well.

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